Show me your (Robertson Hunting) pleats?

[Barb T]

I am considering one for my next project but the huge sett has me wondering how to handle it.

The HR is basically Black Watch with a red stripe and a white stripe instead of black, and it has the same problem that all Black Watch family tartans have. It's an A B A C tartan, and the sett is typically large to very large.

I've made four Hunting Robertson kilts. Three of them were pleated to the stripe, and that made it very easy because there's a red stripe every half sett. The kilts also look incredibly sharp with the red stripe in the dark green. So that's an alternative.

One of the four kilts I did was pleated to the sett. For that one, I "cheated the pleats", picking up the require elements every half sett, rather than every sett. If you work at it, you can do this for almost all the pleats. If you're lucky, it will work out for all of them. I think I had to have two deep pleats where I had to go a full sett to pick up the right element. You can either leave the occasional deep pleat in the kilt (no one is going to see it unless they look at the inside of the kilt), or you could slit the tartan and put a join in if you really wanted all the pleats to have the same depth.

If you look at Retro Red's kilt, the kiltmaker did a pleasing job with the pleats but didn't actually pick up all of the tartan elements symmetrically (there should be a black stripe on both sides of the green, but there's a black stripe only on one side). This was probably because of the problems introduced by the huge sett.

In David's, I think that the same thing has happened, although I can't really see enough of it well enough to be sure. The pleating is pleasing, but it doesn't seem to have all the tartan elements. It looks like the kiltmaker chose to pick up only the A and B elements (the one with the centered red stripe and the one with the centered white stripe). I can't see the C element (the one with the pair of double black stripes) anywhere in the back of the kilt. Again, this is likely because of the problems introduced by the huge sett.

Would be interesting to see other Hunting Rob kilts. Anyone else have one they can photograph and post to show us how other kiltmakers handled it?

Barb